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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by zaxvenz@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block), sparked a weekend’s worth of debate around intellectual property, patents, and copyright, with a characteristically terse post declaring, “delete all IP law.”

X’s current owner Elon Musk quickly replied, “I agree.”

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[-] veeesix@lemmy.ca 151 points 2 weeks ago

So delete all pharmaceutical IP to make drugs accessible to everyone and save taxpayers trillions?

[-] el_muerte@lemm.ee 64 points 2 weeks ago

"Noooo, not like that!"

[-] conditional_soup@lemm.ee 29 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

This is why it's a mixed bag for me. IP law is kinda important in a capitalist system, which, for better or worse, that's what we have. If someone comes up with a wonder drug that outright cures addiction or something, you'd want that person to be able to recoup their costs before a bigger organization with more capital swoops in and undercuts them on production costs until they're the sole supplier of the drug. The hepatitis C cure drug selling for $70,000 is a great example of this quandary; there's millions of dollars worth of research and clinical trials that went into developing the drug, you'd want the company to be able to recuperate the costs of developing it or else there's less incentive to do something similar for other diseases down the line. Also, though, $70,000 or go fucking die is an outrageous statement.

Of course, what we have for IP law in practice is a bastardized monster, where corporations exploit the fuck out of it to have monopoly control over important products like insulins and life-saving medications that cost cents to produce and allow them to sell for hundreds a dose. That's not the intent of IP law, IMO, and that doesn't really serve anyone.

[-] libra00@lemmy.world 32 points 2 weeks ago

I see the point you're aiming at, but it's not little companies discovering new drugs it's giant corporations (often on the back of government research money) who then 'swoop in' to protect their own profits while people in underdeveloped nations die of tuberculosis or whatever because they would rather make money than save lives.

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[-] zeezee@slrpnk.net 17 points 2 weeks ago

idk i think our incentive should be to cure diseases with public funding and make people healthy instead of for profit but what do i know

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[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 weeks ago

The development of new medications should be 100% funded by governments and the IP that comes out of it should be 100% if the government, aka the people.

Governments are the ones that do the investments of projects that don't directly make money but are good for humanity.

You don't like that and the hepac drug can suddenly cost 70 dollars

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[-] Naevermix@lemmy.world 72 points 1 week ago

They don't want to delete all IP law, they just want to delete the IP law which is preventing them from postponing the collapse of the AI hype a little bit more.

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[-] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 1 week ago

They want to do this so they can feed their ai models.

[-] freely1333@reddthat.com 20 points 1 week ago

You can tell China is making strides when suddenly IP laws are a nuisance rather than a fundamental value of the American system lol

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[-] 9tr6gyp3@lemmy.world 57 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Do it., but also ensure that all work enters the public domain and is free for anyone to use, modify, commercialize, or basically whatever the GPL says.

[-] resipsaloquitur@lemm.ee 24 points 2 weeks ago

Nonono, see, they will have punitive contracts with employees that will nail them to the wall if they leak source code.

They like rules as long as they’re the one writing them.

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[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 57 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

... Delete... all... IP law?

So... just literally make all piracy legal, switch all gaming and tv show and movie production/consumption... to an optional donation model?

Fuck it, why not.

I am both an avid pirate and have a degree in econ, wrote papers as an undergrad on how to potentially reform the DMCA... and uh yeah, at this point yeah no one has any fucking idea how any thing works, everyone is an idiot, sure fuck it, blow it all up, why not.

[-] Sizing2673@lemmy.world 35 points 1 week ago

Yeah except you know it isn't going to be that

They're going to go "yeah but not like that"

They'll just remove consumer protections and make it so you own even less and if you try to fight it, you'll have the full weight of the court system to make you poor

Is musk supports it, that's exactly what he's hoping will happen. The rich will be able to take advantage of it and the poor will either stay the same or get worse

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[-] tabular@lemmy.world 49 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Talking about "IP" as if it were a single thing confuses any debate. Copyright is not a patent, which is not a trademark - they do different things.

Software patents actually should be deleted. It is impractical to avoid accidentally infringing as there are multiple ways to describe the same system using totally different technical descriptions. Copyright for software was enough.

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[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 40 points 1 week ago

IP law does 3 things that are incredibly important… but have been basically irrelevant between roughly 1995-2023.

  1. Accurate attribution. Knowing who actually made a thing is super important for the continued development of ideas, as well as just granting some dignity to the inventor/author/creator.
  2. Faithful reproduction. Historically, bootleg copies of things would often be abridged to save costs or modified to suit the politics of the bootlegger, but would still be sold under the original title. It’s important to know what the canonical original content is, if you’re going to judge it fairly and respond to it.
  3. Preventing bootleggers from outcompeting original creators through scale.

Digital technology made these irrelevant for a while, because search engines could easily answer #1, digital copies are usually exact copies so #2 was not an issue, and digital distribution made #3 (scale) much more balanced.

But then came AI. And suddenly all 3 of these concerns are valid again. And we’ve got a population who just spent the past 30 years living in a world where IP law had zero upsides and massive downsides.

There’s no question that IP law is due for an overhaul. The question is: will we remember that it ever did anything useful, or will we exchange one regime of fatcats fucking over culture for another one?

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[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 36 points 1 week ago

"Delete all IP law" say people who have never created anything of any value to humanity.

[-] nthavoc@lemmy.today 32 points 1 week ago

Why not get rid of the patent trolls, the monopolies shelving useful technologies through patent loopholes, the ... Oh I see the tech billionaires again wanting to uproot a system because loopholes are just too much effort now.

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[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 31 points 1 week ago

I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case. IP/patent law is explicitly designed to stifle competition. At most, it should last a few years (if you agree with the "recoup the cost of innovation" argument). Innovation will be done for the sake of innovation if there's competition though. If your opposition innovates and you don't, you're going to be destroyed. The exception is when they agree to not compete, which is already illegal though not enforced as strongly as it should be.

[-] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago

IIRC the original US copyright law as written by the founders was 25 years or so. The extensions on that have all been in the last 70 years or so due to mega corps like Disney.

The problem with Musk and Dorsey is that they want the copyright laws to apply to them but no one else. "Rules for thee but not for me" mentality of the wealthy.

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[-] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 14 points 1 week ago

This is going to be used corporations to take away everything from individuals who are innovating (more than they already are). Nobody will be able to build wealth off a good idea again. Which if we were in a society where wealth wasn't required to live a good life I would be okay with, but we aren't, so I'm not.

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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

I hate agreeing with these assholes, but I do in this case.

I guarantee you that neither of these assholes champion any kind of open access to their end works. Elon famously shut down the Twitter API and vexatiously litigated any number of Tesla copycats. Dorsey is only plugging an anti-IP stance because he's got a new AI engine out and wants to get on board the "Stealing everyone's DeviantArt library" gravy train. None of it is remotely sincere.

If your opposition innovates and you don’t, you’re going to be destroyed.

That's simply not true. There are a myriad of historical examples as to it not being true, from the Japanese abolition of the gun during the Meiji Restoration to German telecoms clinging to copper wire data infrastructure despite fiber optics being obviously superior. If you don't innovate because you have an economic incentive to drag your heels, and your economic clout gives you the ability to close out competitors, then you can do perfectly fine "innovating" in the field of anti-competitive trade behavior rather than real tech innovation.

What we have in Musk and Dorsey are two men who have benefited enormously from Silicon Valley insider investing and cheap borrowing. They don't give a shit about other people's IP in the same way Microsoft was more than happy to pillage code and reverse engineer software of its rivals. But if you think they're going to apply that to their own codebase and personal economic interests... well...

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[-] CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 31 points 1 week ago

Yes, I’m fully aware we want to abolish IP law for different reasons but still, I’m onboard.

[-] Dekkia@this.doesnotcut.it 30 points 2 weeks ago

I'm fully in favour of abolishing IP law for everyone, ideally globally.

Public domain everything.

[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 22 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I suspect that isn't the picture these two have in mind. It's going to be the same as Musk's demand for free speech, which just turns out to mean "let me be an asshole and you're not allowed to complain." This one is going to be "I get to profit off your ideas, but you're not allowed to use mine."

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[-] markovs_gun@lemmy.world 29 points 1 week ago

This would be disastrous for actual manufacturing because a patent is the only thing that makes it worthwhile to spend a bunch of money upfront to develop a new technology. Unlike with software where you don't have nearly as much up front capital investment to develop something, it costs millions of dollars to get a manufacturing process up and running and in a good enough state to where it can actually work out financially. Without patents, your competitor can just take all of that work and investment and just copy it with the benefit of doing it right the first time, so they're able to undercut you on cost. The alternative is that everyone is super secretive about what they're doing and no knowledge is shared, which is even worse. Patents are an awesome solution to this problem because they are public documents that explain how technologies work, but the law allows a monopoly on that technology for a limited amount of time. I also feel that in the current landscape, copyright is probably also good (although I would prefer it to be more limited) because I don't want people who are actually coming up with new ideas having to compete with thousands of AI slop copycats ruining the market.

TL;DR- patents are good if you're actually building things, tech bros are morons who think everything is software.

[-] frezik@midwest.social 12 points 1 week ago

In the manufacturing space, people are questioning if patents help them at all. There is no stopping China from copying your design and selling it on Aliexpress. In fact, since you're almost certainly getting your product manufactured in China in the first place, there is no stopping the very manufacturing plant you're using from producing extras and undercutting you.

Consider this old EEVblog vid about bringing a product to market, and the #1 tip is "don't bother with a patent": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BL1O0xCcY

Patents have evolved to be useful to patent trolls. That's it.

That's not what Dorsey and Musk are after, though. They want to kill copyright law because it's inconvenient for AI training data.

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[-] Vespair@lemm.ee 26 points 1 week ago

Honestly, I'm a fan of abolishing IP law too, but for some reason I suspect the implementation of that they support is very different than the one I support

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 26 points 1 week ago

i'd also like to delete all billionaires

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[-] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 25 points 1 week ago

I think ip laws are important but need to be changed. One example are things that are funded by tax dollars. They can’t own the ip of something we funded even if partially funded. Maybe let them hold the ip until they recoup their cost.

I also think that it is OK for companies to have ip, but it needs to be shorter. Like, they get 10 years or they earn 10x their cost on developing it.

Im not saying my exact ideas are perfect, but just an example of how ip should not last for as long as it does.

[-] maplebar@lemmy.world 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It's not a surprise that all these techbros who want to steal everything and feed it into their AI machines without paying a single fucking cent to the original creators all the sudden want to get rid of IP. They can lead by example by submitting their IP into the public domain.

Or maybe they're just massive frauds?

[-] StJohnMcCrae@slrpnk.net 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

This is of course after they spent decades consolidating power, wealth and influence with those same IP laws, while snuffing out all smaller competitors.

The speed with which Americas tech CEOs have embraced this new oligarchic system is astounding. It's almost like that was the plan all along. Almost.

[-] uis@lemm.ee 22 points 1 week ago

Oh no, this is so... good idea. Yarr! Pirate Party approves.

[-] dzso@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago

Musk is out to delete all laws that don't benefit him, and replace them with harsh private rules that are not accountable to the people.

[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 22 points 1 week ago

I mean, I'd like to get rid of IP Law too....

But I actually mean get rid of, not an "Under New Management" sense like Elon The Musky Husky wants

[-] Tiger_Man_@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 1 week ago

Delete all internet protocol law

[-] athairmor@lemmy.world 17 points 2 weeks ago

This isn’t as forward thinking as you’d want it to be.

For as much as they are abused, “IP laws” protect small and individual inventors, writers, composers, etc.

With no patent, copyright or trademark protections the billionaires will own or bury everything.

What is needed is to bring the laws back to their intended purpose.

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[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

The current US trade war is the perfect opportunity for some other country or countries to "right-size" their IP laws.

Hollywood wanted "lifetime plus 900 years" or whatever. So, whenever the US negotiated a trade deal it said "you only get tariff-free access to our markets if you give Hollywood lifetime plus 900 years in your country too."

With section 1201 of the DMCA this also meant that other countries had to accept that you could only repair your John Deere tractor if you paid Deere for the privilege. Or that HP could prevent you from using any ink but theirs in your printer, allowing them to make printer ink the most expensive liquid on the planet.

If the US is no longer abiding by the terms of their trade agreements, other countries should no longer honor these absurd IP treaties.

[-] deathbird@mander.xyz 15 points 1 week ago

Now that it interferes with me I'm against it. As soon as it's absence causes me any grief I'll be for it again.

[-] orcrist@lemm.ee 15 points 1 week ago

Of course they are both lying. As with all capitalists, they will always use the law to seize greater power.

[-] S_H_K@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago

Be Weird, Download a Car, Generate Art, Screw Copyrights!

[-] randomname@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 week ago

This is the only thing he's ever done or said that I agree with, even though his real intentions are obvious. We really do need a complete re-writing of IP law, but not from Elon.

[-] Guns0rWeD13@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago

i came in to say the same thing. IP law rarely benefits the working class. it's usually a tool used by the likes of disney to bash peasants over the head. it also slows down innovation.

but the problem is, something like this is supposed to coincide with the end of capitalism and implementation of things like UBI.

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[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago

That would be a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Private game servers, fan remakes of shows and movies, I would be over the moon.

Too bad it won't happen

[-] Xenny@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

Hold on hold on. Don't mention a damn thing

[-] minorkeys@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

These people are threats to our actual lives.

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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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